On Fri, 2 Apr 2004, Ernest Cline wrote:
>
> I already have, if you want me to look up a reference to the post
> I will, but it's simple enough I'll repeat myself.
I thought you said it wasn't good enough, which is why I had not taken it
into consideration:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Dec/0101.html
> Implement a second table model. it would be much the same as the current
> one except that 'rowspan' and 'colspan' would be CSS properties and
> would cause the cells to overlap other cells in the source document
> instead of requiring them to not be there.
I'm not sure what you mean.
The problem is solve is: Given this HTML markup snippet:
<table>
<colgroup>
<col id="a">
<col id="b">
<col id="c">
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td id="d">
<td id="e">
<td id="f">
</tr>
<tr>
<td id="g" colspan="2">
<td id="h">
</tr>
</table>
...and this CSS:
#b { display: none; }
#a { color: purple; }
#c { color: blue; }
...find a way to ensure that d and g end up purple and e ends up blue,
with f and h remaining unstyled.
How does your proposal solve this?
> The magical solution that will enable CSS to work with HTML tables that
> use the rowspan and colspan attributes without drastically changing the
> way CSS works doesn't exist.
So it seems. But that is what people want.
> It is long past time to forget about trying to do this. Instead we
> should concentrate on how can CSS have a table model that does what HTML
> tables can do, even if it doesn't do it the same way.
If it doesn't do it in the same way it is largely useless, since the
overwhelming majority of tables are HTML tables.
> This is one area where trying to maintain total backwards compatibility
> is not a good thing.
Backwards compatibility becomes irrelevant when the thing you are being
backwards compatible _with_ has stopped being a prominent part of the
problem. In the current case, it is almost exclusively the _only_ part of
the problem. So being compatible with it is definitely a good thing.
--
Ian Hickson )\._.,--....,'``. fL
U+1047E /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/ `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'